After the meeting, Ashitey says he’s surprised the science team couldn’t predict the sticking.
“They’ve been asking us! How should we know?” he asks.
I tell him Nilton thought there would be sticking. His lab did a series of experiments before the mission.
“Hmm,” he says. Unfortunately, Nilton is not here to say “I told you so.” It’s never that satisfying anyway.
More important than how Ashitey, Nilton, or I feel is what’s happening at HQ. Are they going to approve the plan?
“It’s Sunday,” Peter says. “They’re not in the office.”
I guess NASA only intervenes Monday through Friday between the hours of nine and five Eastern Standard Time. Weekends you’re on your own.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ICE DELIVERY, TAKE TWO
SOL 62
IT’S 7:05 A.M. LOCAL TUCSON TIME; 1:56 P.M. ON MARS. WE WAIT FOR kickoff to begin. There’s one empty chair at the conference table. Where is the RA downlink engineer? After a moment of thumb-twiddling, we start.
“The RA team has a down day,” Vicky says. “So let’s get started.”
“But they don’t get the day off,” Kornfeld adds quickly; as if we might think they’re slacking.
The RA team needs time to regroup. They had another all-night marathon making sure the second attempt would be perfect. They are several days behind in evaluating their own data and need time to catch up. So today we’ll wait for results and put a simplified plan into space, sans RA team. Today’s core plan is remote sensing.
Someone on the TEGA team decided on “Shoes of Fortune” for the sample name. What does that mean? They should consider hiring a copywriter to help with nomenclature. It might do wonders for the PR effort.
“We’ re still all on tenterhooks,” Vicky says, although there’s noticeably less electricity than the last delivery. She says we don’t have a decision tree laying out our next-best options if this doesn’t work. There would need to be some major rethinking, which no one has the energy to consider at this moment.
“We’re going to stay positive,” Vicky says. The first MRO data pass won’t come for a little while. One amazing thing to note is that when everything is optimized and the deep space network works, the data comes down from space at up to 5 mbps. It’s broadband from Mars.
Peter Taylor is a researcher from the University of Toronto. He’s today’s weatherman. He holds up a smiley yellow sun.
“It’s clear and sunny on Mars,” he says. Finally, a real weather report. That’s not the only point of interest from the MET team. It’s fall on Mars, and the sun starts to go down earlier and earlier each sol. With the first dark nights, after the autumnal solstice, they were able to take images of the LIDAR’s laser beam from the SSI camera.
The green laser flickers and illuminates little bits of dust and debris in the Martian atmosphere. You can make out the hints of a wispy passing cloud. We try to take it in. Laser. Mars. Clouds. Wow.
AN HOUR LATER, DATA STARTS TO COME IN FROM MARS.
“TEGA safed,” Joe Stehly says. It’s the same story all over again. They start anew the process of looking for what went wrong this time.
“Your story is ruined, huh?” A young engineer asks, patting me on the back for consolation. This is getting way too meta.
Barry Goldstein and Richard Kornfeld walk through downlink.
“I have a call with Peter and Charles Elachi (the head of JPL) and I am resolute that we’re going to move on. RA will have a down day and TEGA is out. We do one more try and then we will move on,” Barry says.
“YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD THERE IS NOT A LARGE SAMPLE. LET’S get reports and hear from Peter Smith about where to go from here,” Vicky Hipkin says to start midpoint. Peter stands and takes the microphone.
“We’ve had a little time to think about the second non-delivery of ice,” Peter says. He’s getting ahead of himself. He pauses, collects his thoughts for a moment, and starts his talk over.
“We tried to develop a step-by-step process and sample the stratigraphy [layers of dirt] and leave the [delivery of] ice until last. But the tiger team [TEGA wiring experts] report forced us to treat each TA cell as our last. So we diverted. Many on the science team thought soil above the ice was best. But HQ dictated we get into the ice. And since July 1st, we’ve done it. It’s become a science experiment. Now we need to get dry soil into TEGA. That’s what the science team wants. And I’ve emailed Ed Weiler [head of the science program at NASA] and I hope to speak to him so we can be released from this requirement. We will then sample the dry soil. Probably there won’t be ice, but we can still get results. The public wants to know our results. We need to complete our WCL story and present it to the world,” Peter says. Then he pauses for moment.
“Are there any dissenting opinions?” he asks. There are none. Instead, there is thunderous applause.
“What if NASA disagrees? Is there a fallback position?” Peter Taylor from the MET team asks.
Ramon de Paula is in the room. I’m not sure Taylor realizes this. Maybe he does. I don’t think anyone cares or feels like he adds any value to the situation anyway. Ramon raises his eyebrows but says nothing.
“If they’re not on board, we could all take a few days vacation,” Mark Lemmon says with a smile. It would be a good old-fashioned sick-out. Stick it to the man.
Peter Smith stands with an arm on his hip. He looks stoic. Peter takes over. This is his mission once again.
“I guess it becomes a game of hardball at that point. I think we’re all very certain of the path we need to take. I think I was very direct about it in my email,” Peter says.
“I don’t think he minced words,” Bill Boynton says with a side-long grin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MARS MAN FOREVER
SOL 63
PETER’S ASSISTANT, FRANKIE KOLB, ASKS EVERYONE TO PLEASE head outside.
“We’re taking a team photo,” she says. After yesterday’s rousing speech, it seems like a great moment to document the mission for posterity!
I grab my camera and follow the team.
“You can’t just take a picture,” Rolfe Bode says. “Aren’t you going to join us?” Then my inner imp takes over. I imagine the photo hanging on the wall in the Explorer’s Club fifty years from now … and I’m in it. My heart races. Why not?
I make an executive decision: I’m getting in that photo. As long as I can stay away from Peter and especially Sara, everything should be okay. I take deep breaths to try to slow my heartbeat. The thumping noise is a dead giveaway. Getting kicked out of the photo, a public show of no-confidence, scares the bejesus out of me. I don’t think my ego could handle it, and then I’d just sit on the curb crying while everyone else smiled and said “Mars!”
I kneel casually in the third row far from Peter and keep my head down. The photographer looks through his lens and then he begins the slow process of repositioning those he deems out of place. I mentally plead with him to leave me alone. I’m very happy where I am. And, of course, he doesn’t listen. I can feel him looking at the top of my head.
“Hey, you!” the photographer says.
Oh, please don’t be talking to me.
“I can’t see you, I need you to move up,” he says. I ignore him to no avail. He comes over, and, with two firm hands on my shoulders, I’m politely repositioned. I keep telling myself not to look at Peter. Not to look at Peter. Then, of course, my rubberneck car-crash brain takes over. I look over at Peter. He catches my eye, but then looks away. Maybe he didn’t see me. Maybe he did.
1 … 2 … 3 … click. Now I’m a part of the Phoenix team … forever. Only an act of Photoshop can change this fact.
BACK IN THE COOL WINDOWLESS SOC, WE GATHER FOR THE END-OF- sol science meeting.
“It’s been a long summer,” Peter says, and waits for everyone to quiet.
“We’ve been through almost two Mars cycles. But we cannot continue to operate like this. There are student
s, teachers, children, and we have to return to Earth time. I pushed back on Barry and we’ve agreed to go to August 11 as a date to return to Earth time because we’re very close to mission success. But we will do a transition and we will pay a penalty. Barry will speak for JPL. He holds the contracts with the co-investigators. If you have concerns, now is the time to share them.” Peter then takes a seat while this news sinks in.
“What about remote operations?” Carol Stoker asks. Also known as distributed ops, this phase of the mission happens when the SOC is liquidated and the mission conducted via phone calls and Internet at a highly reduced pace.
“We will go remote on the 24th of August. We want to feel comfortable with Earth time ops first,” a senior engineer on the phone at JPL says.
“That coincides with sol 89,” Peter says. “The end of the primary mission.”
NASA and Peter scheduled the mission for ninety days. That was a prediction for how long the lander would likely last and, therefore, how long NASA would fund operations at Mission Control. The transition to Earth time and then remote operations will happen in a few steps to keep everything running as smoothly as possible. Of course, everyone hopes it will last much longer, but NASA hasn’t committed any additional funds. We don’t even know how they’ll react when Peter tells them he’s making one last effort to get ice and then we are moving on no matter what.
“Our funding for the extended mission will go further when we move to five-day weeks. Obviously we can’t keep working seven days. We’ll need fewer redundant staff then, too,” the engineer on the phone says.
“Are we supposed to charge for the weekends?” Bill asks jokingly.
“Yes!” Peter says. “Please send the bills to Barry.”
“I will file them appropriately,” Barry says with a chuckle.
“What about remote login and the applications?” Carol Stoker asks.
There are already problems with the secure accounts required to log in to the remote operations system, and anyone who has tried to participate in the mission while away complains about the software. The lag time for monitoring what’s happening in the SOC can feel worse than the delay from Mars. Carol’s question is, as usual, leading.
“We’re working on it,” the voice on the phone says. “We know there are some bandwidth issues.”
“How do we deal with the nine time zones?” Stubbe, a German scientist, asks.
Mike Mellon shakes his head. He thinks these concerns are important but skirt the real issue.
“How are we gonna get the science done?” he asks.
“We took a big hit of twenty-five days and the right thing to do is push back,” Barry says, trying to convince Mike the extra week of Mars time is a gift from NASA and will be enough to make up for the twenty-five days lost looking for ice. Mike isn’t convinced. An extra week of working on Mars time doesn’t feel like they’re “pushing back” hard enough. Mike feels like the mission will get shortchanged by a bureaucratic decision.
There’s a lot to consider in this move back to Earth time. First, there’s a budgetary concern; NASA hasn’t committed any additional funds. Peter and Barry still need to make the case for an extended mission. The support staff is exhausted; everyone is exhausted. Working on Mars time is really taking its toll. Most importantly, the team members have commitments back home. Most of the scientists teach or have labs to run, or both. The semester is going to start in September and they will have to leave. If they hope to keep the mission going after the team returns to their home institutions, they need time to transition to remote operations. That won’t be easy and can’t happen all at once. If they don’t do it slowly, it could cripple—rather than merely slow—the mission. It’s not just a matter of people calling in on the phone and continuing the mission. Joel and his team need to restructure the entire planning cycle and then the team needs to practice this new structure.
These Earth time debates might come as a shock but they percolated quietly in back rooms for the last couple weeks. There were just more important concerns. Now we hear it public for the first time and it just feels wrong. Sure there are lots of practical reasons, but this is Mars.
“I appreciate the week, but what then? What about the science?” Mike asks again.
He’s polite but unhappy.
“Well, we have a boundary condition; people have to go home. It will have to happen,” Barry says.
This doesn’t satisfy Mike. There is another hour of back and forth. People have a lot of questions about how any work will get done on Earth time, especially once different time zones are factored in. It’s messy. The scientists are angry. One sol will carry out slowly over two or three Earth days. That’s going to quash any ambitious plans the scientists had for exploring the trenches and completing all the TEGA and MECA experiments that were originally planned.
Perhaps we would not have done all the experiments anyway. But spending all that time on a futile directive—from bureaucrats that never even bothered to come visit the mission—prevented us from pursuing a more logical, science-driven approach. That makes this return-to-Earth-time move feel a little more tragic, a missed opportunity for further discovery.
Today is NASA’s 50th anniversary. No one celebrates.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE THIRD TIME
SOL 64
PETER’S OFFICE DOOR IS OPEN AND HE’S SHOWING SOMEONE OUT, a journalist. But it’s not a friendly good-bye.
“This isn’t Capricorn 1!” Peter says to this reporter who suggests they should really have accomplished more in their time on Mars. Capricorn 1 is a fictional film about NASA faking a manned Mars mission and then murdering a bunch of people in a cover-up. O. J. Simpson is in it. Download it today.
“We’re really up there doing it!” Peter says and walks off.
He just kicked out a reporter. I think he’s a bit tired of getting kicked around by NASA and those darn media folks who think we’re sitting around twiddling our thumbs. Now he’s kicking back.
KICKOFF TODAY IS VERY MATTER-OF-FACT. PEOPLE CAN’T BE FUSSED FOR complete sentences or long explanations. Doug Ming goes through core plan: Rosey Red, blind delivery, and WCL. Then TEGA bake. Also, Trench A is renamed Cupboard. Why? Because you find great things in the Cupboard. Doug quickly lists the forward dependencies for TEGA. There’s no discussion.
I don’t know if this is a sign that everyone knows the routine so well by now that they’ve melded into a single organism, or that they’re all just frustrated and tired of one another and can’t be bothered to react. It is the third and final attempt, a repeat of the last plan with all the kinks ironed out (hopefully). No matter what happens, this is the last go. We’ll tell NASA that we tried three times and that the ice on Mars keeps sticking to the scoop and there is nothing we can do about it. If NASA wants us to proceed, we can acquire and deliver more general samples in a systematic way. We’re moving ahead regardless.
The spacecraft team reports that everything is nominal, their word for normal. Doug tells the MECA team to scrub their plan better, meaning he thinks it needs to be cleaned up. The APIDs don’t look right to him.
“These APIDs are not in shape and we don’t want to lose any data,” Doug says. But before he can describe the problem with the data prioritization, he’s interrupted.
“We have an oven-full signal!” Matt Robinson says, bounding out of the RA office. He always seems to be around when there’s good news. He jumps and smiles like a madman. There’s a kind of shock. He seems like the only one who really cares. He’s the only one who has seen the data downlink. Maybe no one believes him.
Line Drube and Morten Madsen poke their heads outside of the RAC office. They want to know what’s happening.
“No one is jumping for joy,” I say.
“Well, they are all reserved,” Line says. “They’ve been burned twice.” Mads Ellehøj comes into downlink with a coffee.
“How’s it hanging?” Mads asks. We get to tell him the good news.
“Yeah, it’s full,” Mads says.
Peter comes out of his office; gets the news. He doesn’t really react either.
What’s happening?
The RA guys go back to their office to work on the next delivery. No one celebrates.
“Why should we celebrate?” Richard Volpe asks. “We just repeated what we did a month ago, except now with scraping and ice.” Those guys are hard to please. Even so, this is fantastic.
Heather Enos comes into the RA office to thank Ashitey for the all-night effort. She looks happy. That’s two people. He goes to give her a handshake; she gives him a huge hug.
Ashitey sometimes errs on the very formal. The other night when they’d missed another meal while planning the delivery, the TEGA team bought pizza. Ashitey insisted on paying for the slice he ate. He’s not allowed to receive gifts. It’s part of his government employee contract with JPL, and he certainly would not want any appearance of impropriety.
“I guess the third time is a charm,” Ashitey says to Heather.
HEATHER ENOS DISAPPEARS FOR A MOMENT. THEN SHE COMES BACK with cups.
“You know I pulled out two gray hairs yesterday,” Heather says.
“I thought you were giving a toast,” Peter says. She thanks everyone for the late nights and repeated efforts. She starts to cry before she can finish.
“We don’t want to forget those people in the back room [shift II engineers] who do something to get the commands to the spacecraft,” Bill says, finishing Heather’s toast. We drink to discovering ice on Mars and getting back to the mission.
Heather asks what the sample is called.
Martian Summer Page 25